Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Wesley Ruggles | No Man of Her Own

no man of his own

by Douglas Messerli

Milton
Herbert Gropper and Maurine Dallas Watkins (screenly, based on a story by
Benjamin Glazer and Edmund Goulding, based, in turn, on a novel by Val Lewton),
Wesley Ruggles (director) No Man of Her
Own / 1932

The
highly underrated film No Man of Her Own
is based on a very simple principle that has been used time and again in
theater art and movie making: a cad courts a beautiful girl, who not only gets
him to marry her but reforms him through love. Two of Broadway’s favorite
musicals (later to very popular movies) Guys
and Dolls and The Music Man share
almost the very same story. The same tale, from the woman’s point of view, is
retold in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve.

The reason why it’s so interesting in
this earlier film derives from its major actors: Clark Gable and Carole
Lombard. As a sophisticated gambler Clark as Babe Stewart is literarily swept
off his feet by the smart-cracking beautiful small-town librarian Connie
Randall (Lombard). And even though they marry on a toss of a coin, it is clear
that such a con-man like him will not survive long without her.

Even though Babe bluffs that he’ll
quickly ditch her, after their first long night together (where he and his
cronies quickly fleece a wealthy fellow gambler), she sends him truly spinning
by demanding that he get up early and go to work. Without day-time experience
and, more importantly, without a job, he is forced to pay a friend for an
office in Wall Street to hide out during the days. Strangely, without anything
much to do he dabbles in investments and, as we later perceive, achieves other
financial success.

When Randall finally begins to guess his
true avocation, she switches his marked deck of cards, forcing him to lose. She
is also visited by Babe’s former lover, Kay Everly (Dorothy Mackaill) who helps
wise-up Randall on her husband’s doings and his scuffles with the law. Yet love
holds sway, even while Babe ponders a voyage to Rio de Janeiro with his fellow
card-sharks. Instead of leaving, the gambler unexpectedly turns himself into
the police who have been trying to get something on him. He’ll serve several months
in jail if after that they clear him and stop tailing his actions.

Months later, he returns to his now pregnant
wife, pretending to have returned from his transatlantic voyage, without
realizing that she knows of his deception and he lives, presumably,
happily-ever-after as a loving husband as a Wall Street exec.

In short, the story is a standard fairy
tale about the powerful effects of good and loving women, like Randall, who are
perfectly willing to be seduced if they can change their man’s ways—as the
famous Frank Loesser ditty, “Marry the Man Today” promises. Even though,
reportedly, Gable and Lombard sparked no romantic moments during the shooting
of this film (Gable purportedly found
Lombard far too bawdy and outspoken and she saw him as conceited) it is clear
from this, their only film together, that they represent a kind
“pepper-and-salt” match.

Yet, there’s something wrong with this
picture that begins with its title. Who “has no man of her own” we must ask,
when it is clear at the first moment that Randall and Babe meet, he will be her
“man?” Does the title refer to his ex, Kay? If so, nothing is made of it, and
she quickly backs off in any challenges against Randall for Babe—although the
film ads (not from the completed film) tends to suggest this.

Nor was the original working title (named
after the story on which it was based), No
Bed of Her Own any more illuminating.Once she marries Babe, his wife certainly does have “a bed of her own,”
primarily since he spends most of the (real movie time) in jail, doing a kind
of symbolic penance for his previously bad deeds.

And there are so many other questions.
Why is such a dapper, wealthy man spending time with such thugs as Charlie Vane
(Grant Mitchell) and other such crooks? True, the money is easy takings given
the braggart moneybags with whom he plays. But this high-time spender seems to
have everything, including a beautifully furnished penthouse, while his
partners live in fleabag hotel rooms.

How could such an obviously sentimental
figure as Babe, who so quickly falls in love, be a cutthroat gambler? Even if
we accept him as a kind of polished Nicky Arnstein (of Funny Girl) figure, things still don’t quite add up—particularly
since he is so equally adept at Wall Street gambles.

The director Ruggles makes absolutely no
attempt to “explain” Babe’s bad-boy behavior and his truly quite speedy
transformation into a loving husband. Maybe it’s better that such fairy tales
are not analyzed too much. Besides, as we’ve discovered in so many movies,
Lombard, as daffy as she is, always gets her man. Perhaps it might be more
appropriately titled, No Man of His Own,
without suggesting any secret “gay” coding, but simply pointing to the fact
that Babe is just what his name suggests, a kind of child, who has utterly no
control over his own adult male identity.